Sunday, February 08, 2009

Mundi's blog is full of it.

Sic transit gloria mundiI went to Portland last weekend to participate, with the Philosophy Talk radio program, in a seminar. That’s right. I’m an intellectual. Get over it.

On the way from the airport to the hotel, I spotted this sign: Airport of the Year. On the way to the airport from the hotel, I spotted this sign, for Horizon Air, Regional Airline of the Year. I did not note the years.

Michael PhelpsThe Olympian wunderkind was photographed smoking a bong, igniting both amusement and outrage from an easily amused and more easily outraged nation. I say as long as he doesn’t try to burn a blunt while swimming, America is safe.

Stephen FowlerOn a recent WIFE SWAP, a supercilious Brit (now living in San Francisco) and partner in a bioenergy firm got, in exchange for his “weight loss coach” wife, a housewife from Missouri whose family loves paintball.

In the course of the program Mr. Fowler called his swapped wife fat, stupid, and less of a person for living in a podunk town. He told her the only way her children would ever see the world would be to join the military. He called her a stupid hillbilly, redneck and the stupidest person he had ever met on the earth. He added that he earns more in one week than her husband did in a year.

He was a complete asshole, in other words. And America agreed! The blogosphere ignited. Pretty much every bit of information that could be found about the guy was posted – his job, his address, his email, his phone number, his board memberships. He had to hire security to watch his home.

And, on several blogs, this was posted: “Stephen Fowler has resigned from Pacific Environment’s Board of Directors and is no longer associated with the organization in any way. Please note that he was never an employee of the organization; rather, he was a volunteer.”

Well done, blogosphere, I guess. You may have destroyed a man’s life, just because he was rude to a woman on television. That's social networking in action!

But then there’s…Christian Bale, caught on tape, tearing a DP a new one because he was fiddling with lights or something while he was trying to do a scene. America found this amusing. Seemed like a run-of-the-mill temper tantrum to me. It may even have been justified. Why for the life of me this tore across the Web is beyond me.

And then there’s…“David After the Dentist.” Look it up on YouTube. A cute kid is all drugged-up and says druggy kid things. It is pretty funny. He says things like “I have two fingers,” and “Is this real life?” Okay, ha ha. But there are already mashups, and reenactments, and animated versions, much like what happened with the zombie kid who likes turtles (Remember that? Oh, how quickly we forget!). What is with us? Don’t we have anything important to do? Or at least find something trivial to do that doesn’t involve turning a minor episode in a child’s life into a life-defining searing soul trauma? Just asking.

And then there’s…President Obama. Boy, that honeymoon period was quick!

But, armed with his well-stocked cabinet of tax evaders, he staggers on, into our glorious future!

My dreamI had a dream last night that I was performing at some college somewhere (as I did so many times back in the late seventies and early eighties) with Duck’s Breath partner Jim Turner, and Jonathan Winters (that’s right, him, but younger). But then a troupe performing a show with giant puppets showed up, and everybody dashed out of the audience to go see the giant puppets. I emailed Jim about this, and he emailed back, “That wasn’t a dream.” Thanks, America. Thanks for nothing.

And then there’s…From NYT: “…eightmaps.com …takes the names and ZIP codes of people who donated to the ballot measure (the notorious Proposition 8) — information that California collects and makes public under state campaign finance disclosure laws — and overlays the data on a Google map.”

“Some donors to groups supporting the measure have received death threats and envelopes containing a powdery white substance, and their businesses have been boycotted.”

And then there’s this…From Slate: “Last November, an inebriated 24-year-old with the woefully apt name of Kyle Drinkwine was found by police in the back of a Wisconsin alley, his hands covered in blood. According to testimony compiled by the Smoking Gun, Drinkwine had spent the evening unwinding at Emma's Bar, a local watering hole that was hosting a karaoke night. Shortly after performing an Eminem song, he allegedly became so enraged by another patron's version of ‘Holy Diver’—the 1983 anthem by heavy-metal patriarch Ronnie James Dio—that he assaulted the singer and his friend and fled when police arrived.”

The story was called “Karaoke Rage.” Add it to your list of things to worry about, won’t you? Thanks.

2 Comments:

Anonymous said...

To be fair, it would kind of depend on what the puppets were. Suppose it were a giant puppet Jonathan Winters --- that would have to attract some attention. (I've also recently been trying to overcome my brain's reluctance to agree that it was Carl Reiner playing a supporting part in the 1959 movie The Gazebo, and not Jonathan Winters.)

My most recent lingering dream has involved being with a dear one and some family in a hotel as it comes under attack from Borg and characters from the less-important Trek shows, only to have it all spin out into a Trek convention that the hotel staff are really getting tired of and a bit sarcastic about.

I don't get the Christian Bale thing, but I've never really got anything that people were generally enthusiastic about since Thundarr the Barbarian went off the air, and that was only really a hit with eight-year-old boys.